Totally Stuffed

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

Totally Stuffed

It’s Thanksgiving, the day when Americans celebrate everything we’re grateful for by eating more food in one meal than we normally eat in 2 days. With all that turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, and mountains of other yummy foods on the table, it’s hard to stop eating. But you probably don’t eat as much as Joey Chestnut, who just won the Foxwoods turkey-eating contest on Tuesday. He ate over 9 pounds of turkey in just 10 minutes, almost twice Sonya Thomas’ record 5 ¼ pounds from 2011. You might recognize Joey’s name as the same guy who often wins the Nathan’s Fourth of July hot-dog eating contest, proving that you can overeat on any holiday. And the worst of it is, today he has to eat turkey all over again!

Wee ones: If you’re counting up the 9 pounds of turkey Joey ate, what numbers do you say?

Little kids: Joey was one of 10 contestants. How many other people were trying to out-eat him?Bonus: If Joey’s turkey weighed 20 pounds to start and he ate 9 pounds of it, how many pounds of turkey were left on his plate?

Big kids: If Joey needed a big gulp of water after every 4th bite, after which bite would he have taken his 6th gulp? Bonus: If you’re trying to race Joey and you’re 8 1/2 minutes into the 10-minute race, how much time do you have left to try to catch up to him?

The sky’s the limit: If at Thanksgiving today you eat a whopping 7 pounds of food, and you eat twice the weight of turkey as sweet potatoes and twice as much sweet potato as apple pie, how much of each one did you eat? (Assume you ate only those 3 things.)

Answers:Wee ones: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9!

Little kids: 9 other contestants. Bonus: 11 pounds.

Big kids: After the 24th bite. Bonus: 1 1/2 minutes.

The sky’s the limit: You eat 4 pounds of turkey, 2 pounds of sweet potato and 1 pound of apple pie. If p is the amount of pie, then you’re eating 2p pounds of sweet potato and 4p pounds of turkey, giving us
4p + 2p + 1p = 7
7p = 7

So it works out nicely!

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking while still in diapers, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.